


Pack a Change of Clothes, It's Time to Move On

by whetstone



Category: Big Bang (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:15:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whetstone/pseuds/whetstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small town AU based on the song "Photobooth" by Death Cab for Cutie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pack a Change of Clothes, It's Time to Move On

in the suburbs fireflies come out, little bits of light dappling the dusk. when seunghyun thinks hard enough he can turn them into the freckles on jiyong’s shoulders, the little mole next to his nose.

if he thinks hard enough, he can close his eyes and be eighteen again, at his grandmother’s house out in the country. everything is toned sepia, or maybe it’s just that the sun is always setting. jiyong always comes up the big hill on his bike, shirtless and sweaty, and seunghyun’s always wearing too many layers for the weather.

 _we’re going to be friends,_ jiyong says, flopping down beside him on the porch, draining the water bottle seunghyun’d set there two hours prior, and when seunghyun shrugs and says _sure,_ the word’s well-worn with how many times he’s said it in his head.

he can sketch out the long dirt paths and the pebbles that got caught in his nikes, feel the crunch of ice cubes stolen from the dispenser at the corner store, maybe the wet slap of his t-shirt as he dives into lake water, the suffocating feeling of it on his face as it’s tugged away from his body.

at night when the streetlights flicker on and the bmws turn on their floodlights he pretends they’re the lights over the baseball field, thinks of getting smacked in the legs by chaerin or youngbae brandishing a ball, hiding behind daesung as they play kickball in semi-darkness, jiyong hunched over because he’s laughing so hard. he can almost feel the weight of daesung’s arm around his shoulders and the quiet burr of youngbae’s laugh and the claustrophobic feeling of being squashed between five people in a backseat built for three.

when he gives up on sleep and has a beer the couch becomes the back of seungri’s truck, everyone huddled over their bottles as seunghyun tells them about the city, jiyong’s disbelief dogging every statement until he knocks him over the head with the cap opener. then the laugh track on the tv becomes theirs.

when he pulls his car into the morning commute he thinks of bumpy roads and screaming to _motherfucking shift, we’re going to stall,_ jiyong laughing so hard he hiccups. _calm down,_ he always says, and his hand moves from the stick shift to seunghyun’s knee, back and forth and over again. seunghyun’s gone over the feeling so many times he has to concentrate to get it back: the visceral jolt, muscle jumping under skittish fingers that clamp onto the steering wheel when they meet each other’s eyes.

work is nothing but a series of blank stares and smoke breaks. the air is cold and seunghyun pulls his collar up against his neck, cigarette glowing red in the grey of the car park. he thinks of dara sputtering over one of his marlboros and passing it onto bom and then little minji who’d taken it like a trooper, seungri who dropped it before handing it to jiyong, who’d passed it on.

 _i don’t know how either,_ he’d said. that night seunghyun had showed him, smoke hovering between their mouths before he’d finally closed the distance, and this he rarely thinks about, the first time, the slip-slide of jiyong’s tongue against his, jiyong’s mouth against his dimples and his hands under jiyong’s shirt, mapping out skinny angles and goosebumps with his fingers.

he goes back to work and his jacket is pooled on the floor and he wishes he he’d paid more attention to that, because the jacket becomes their ratty t-shirts and undone sneakers, bits of early autumn leaves caught in the soles of their shoes. jiyong crawls over him and then he’s under him and seunghyun shivers in his cubicle, rubs the goosebumps from his arms and picks the jacket off of the floor.

then he’s at some bar with some co-workers, one of the chain restaurant type deals with big fried onions and overpriced margaritas. he’d never liked these in the city and he didn’t like them in the country, but back then they didn’t card and he liked seeing jiyong drunk, red-faced and happy, the keys looped to his pocket digging into seunghyun’s thigh. let’s take pictures, he’d said. he said it almost every week, seunghyun remembers, but they were group photos and so they were distributed out. he thinks about when they went in with sweaters and jackets on, the little twist to jiyong’s mouth when he’d asked.

four photos, faded and folded in his bottom desk drawer at home, but in his mind he can feel jiyong’s elbow in his eye and jiyong’s arm around his neck and jiyong’s breath spilling whiskey on his cheek and the flash going off, bright as his smile. he’d pried the strip from seunghyun’s hands with knobbly fingers and examined them. _make me a copy,_ he’d declared.

when he gets home he takes a walk. it’s cold, almost colder than the fall that had slapped him in the face. cigarette butts and beer bottles are unheard of here, but the little canyon next to his grandmother’s glinted green with them. he’d kicked them over and added to the litter and waited until jiyong showed. he couldn’t bring himself to say anything, and when he thinks of it now he still doesn’t, just lets jiyong talk even though his eyes flit away from him and he walks a little ahead. _you only see sun like that down here,_ he says, and when seunghyun looks up into the sky he’s blinded again.

there’s never an ending. it’s always his mother pulling up in her station wagon and his grandmother with wet eyes and chaerin biking by with her mouth drawn tight, seunghyun’s head against the window and photobooth pictures curled up in his coat pocket, a scarf around his neck for the cold. he’d sent a postcard, but he likes to pretend that didn’t happen, because he never got anything back.

sometimes he thinks it isn’t healthy, all the remembering, how he can see and smell and taste everything. sometimes he makes up his mind to go back out there when his parents do. sometimes he’s tired of sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day. sometimes he thinks about the sadness behind daesung’s smile. sometimes he wonders if youngbae’s gotten together with chaerin. sometimes he wonders if the baseball field still has grass, or if the corner store’s put a lock on their ice dispenser. sometimes he wonders what jiyong’s doing, if he cares, if he remembers.

sometimes he’s tired of wondering.


End file.
